Month: October 2011

That’s So Raven: the Bird that Inspired Edgar Allan and an Interview with the Poe Guy

I did a piece for the Philly Post today (Philly Mag’s daily blog) about the bird that inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. It’s a pretty cool piece. Check it out, and if you dig it, please spread the word by clicking recommend at the top of it or retweeting it. Thanks!

Doing this piece gave me a chance to interview Edward Pettit (above), the self proclaimed “Philly Poe Guy” that I mention in the piece. There was a lot of cool stuff in the interview that didn’t really work itself into the fairly narrow scope of the piece, but I thought some of you might find it interesting, so I’m going to include a bit of it here.

JGT: Poe met with Dickens for a short while in Philadelphia, in 1842 at the US Hotel. What did they talk about?

PETTIT: They had a lot in common to talk about regarding copywrite. The laws were so loose, and the authors wanted their money. And of course, Poe is looking for a favor. He wants Dickens to talk to publishers in England and try to get published over there. Dickens tried and failed. That was probably Poe’s real motive for talking to Dickens.

JGT: Was Poe the kind of guy who wrote in a fury, or did he sort of write as it came to him?

PETTIT: He was simply writing all of the time. We know he had a problem with drinking, but there is no way he was an alcoholic. He was writing every single day. If he was a total drunk, he could not have written as much as he did. Not in a maniacal fury, just doggedly pursuing it every day. Just writing. He sits down every day, and works and corrects things he wrote.

JGT: Had his wife gotten ill by the time he spoke with Dickens? (Poe’s wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, contracted TB in 1842 and died of it in 1847).

PETTIT: She had just become ill. The poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman. His mother ides when he’s young. His foster mother dies of tuberculosis. His wife comes down with TB and dies. If you’re a woman and Poe loves you, you’re doomed. That really affects what he writes. You can see all these beautiful young women in his stories dying.

They had a very successful, very loving marriage. He devoted his life trying to take care of her.

JGT: You are working on a book about how Philadelphia shaped Poe’s works. How did Philly affect Poe?

PETTIT: I believe the time he spent in Philadelphia was crucial. He would not have written some of his greatest works had he not been in Philadelphia. There was a literary culture here that I call Philadelphia gothic. People talk about American gothic, well gothic culture is from Philadelphia. Poe is very aware of Charles Brockton Brown. Great novel called Weiland. Real dark, nasty stories. They are the first dark gothic works in America. European gothic tradition is all about aristocrats, the supernatural, and ancestral curses. In American gothic you don’t have to worry about the spirits of some ancestor coming to murder you, you have to worry about your crazy husband killing you, or the serial killer next door. There are more American gothic works published in Philadelphia than anywhere else in America.

Poe is writing Gothic stories before coming to Phialdelphia in the European tradition. All of a sudden, Poe lives in Philly for about a year or two, and his stories begin to change. They are no longer supernatural , the threat could be domestic. Even William Wilson, the threat comes from within the guys own self. Had he settled in New York, where he went to after Philly, I don’t think he would have started in this strain. That tradition wasn’t up there in New York. It’s here in Philadelphia.

9th Annual Halloween Spooktacular Halloween Night!

One night only, JGT is bustin out his annual Halloween spooktacular, the oldest tradition in the JGT empire. It’s gonna be at North Star bar on Halloween night, October 31st. If you want to play, and still want to play later in the week, feel free. All questions will be about demons, murder, and mayhem. And of course as always a few about Edgar Allan Poe. Hope to see ya at the North Star at 7 p.m. Gonna be a fun way to spend Halloween without almost getting your ass kicked by a bunch of douchebags dressed up like a SWAT team.

Good News/Bad News

The good news is that we quite possibly just had our wildest week of quizzo ever. I don’t ever remember every single top team at every single bar losing on the same week, and we’ve definitely never had this many teams who have played for a while and never won before all win on the same week. Add to that that every bar was packed and it was honestly one of the best weeks of quizzo I can ever remember hosting.

The bad news is that I upgraded my phone on Thursday, and when I did so, it somehow erased my photos from Tuesday and Wednesday. Yeah, I’m a jerk. However, as long as your team shows up at quizzo next week I will get your photo and post it on the site. I promise. Furthermore, your team will be included in the power rankings this week. So sorry about the screw up. Thanks -jgt

The Original iPod…in 1979

We had a question at quizzo this week about a device that was invented in 2001 and had sold 300 million copies, but which looked eerily similar to a device that was invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer. The answer is of course the iPod. Here’s a bit of the backstory to that question.

You fans of The Wire surely remember the scene where DeAngelo explains that the guy who invented the Chicken Nugget isn’t rich, but working in a basement for Mr. McDonald for minimum wage. Well, his tale of Mr. Nugget is similar to that of Kane Kramer. Kramer was the 23 year old inventor who, in 1979, came up with the concept of the mp3 player. In fact, he built a working model at that time. But like the computer and Charles Babbage, there was very little technology at the time to support his invention. He could have stored 3.5 minutes of music on the device. He was unable to get the money keep his patent, which Apple later scooped up and used to help create their iPod. Kramer is none the richer, despite the fact that he’s the father of one of the most popular devices of the past decade. Here’s some more info from Wired.com:

Kramer came up with the idea for a pocket-sized, portable solid state music player with a friend, James Campbell. Kramer was 23, Campbell 21. The IXI System had a display screen and buttons for four-way navigation. In a report presented to investors in 1979, the IXI was described as being the size of a cigarette packet. Is this sounding familiar yet?

Back in 1979, a memory chip would store a paltry three and a half minutes of music. Kramer fully expected this to improve, and confidently foresaw a market for reliable, high quality digital music players which would be popular with both consumers and the record labels. It could actually be argued that he was still ahead of Apple after the firat iPod went on sale — that had a hard drive and Kramer had moved onto flash memory years earlier.

Much has been made of Apple somehow “stealing” the technology. But the patent did what all patents do, whether used or not. It lapsed, and whether Apple took the idea from there or from somewhere else, it was all perfectly legitimate. In fact, when Apple was suing (and counter-sued by) Burst.com in 2006 it cited the invention as “prior art” to dispute Burst’s patents. Apple even called Kramer in to give evidence.

But anyone can dream up a magic futuristic gadget. That’s where James Campbell came in. Campbell was an electronics whizz and between them the men came up with four prototypes. According to Kramer’s website, a fifth, pre-production unit actually went on sale at the APRS exhibition at Earls Court, London.

Here’s some more cool stuff from Kramer’s pitch to potential investors. This was written in 1979:

Record albums and/or singles issued by recording companies are fed in digital form into a computerised Central Data Bank. This data bank is connected by telephone lines to all retailers. The computer holds this digital information and upon receipt of coded instructions from retailers terminal, will transmit the requested music instantaneously to the terminal, where it is then programmed onto a blank IXI CHIP. It calculates and bills the retailers account, splits the relative apportionments of PRS, Artists Royalties, writers and record companies share, all in a matter of seconds.

Is This the Worst Song in the History of Music?

 

This week’s question of the week was, WHat group had an album called “I’m Not a Fan But the Kids Like It”? The answer was Brokencyde. They are above. Now before you watch this, a word of caution: Once you watch it, you can’t unwatch it. It will take a up a small sliver of your brain forever. And make no mistake: listening to this song will make your life worse. Not a lot worse, but it is worth noting before you watch. I’ve head Celine Dion, I’ve heard Nick Lachey, and I’ve heard Creed. Hell, I’ve even heard Aqua. And this is, improbably, worse than all of them.

Sabermetricians: Ruining Baseball for the Rest of Us

by Bobby Badtimes

On October 14th, 2003, the Chicago Cubs battled the Florida Marlins in Game 6 of the NLCS. It was the 8th inning, and the Cubs held a 3-0 lead. They recorded the first out of the inning, and victory seemed all but assured. Then, on a pop fly into foul territory, a fan named Steve Bartman reached out and knocked the ball away from Cubs outfielder Moises Alou. Alou screamed at the fan, and in an instant a different vibe came over the game. Where there had been a party-like atmosphere, there was now a palpable sense of desperation. It was nothing you could put your finger on. But it existed, and everyone in the bar I watched the game with knew that the tide of the game had shifted.

It is part of the fun of watching baseball. Even in a society that is driven by science and which laughs at anyone who believes in voodoo, Gods, or miracles, baseball holds a certain hallowed ground. When pitchers are in the midst of a no-hitter, any fan of that team who dares utter, “He’s got a no-hitter going” is liable to get smacked across the head for jinxing it. When the home team falls behind, fans turn their hats backwards. You learn not to predict good things for your teams, because you don’t want to offend the Baseball Gods. When the team is on a hot streak in the post-season, fans stop shaving or even changing clothes. And there is a certain energy to games. You can get a feeling in your spine, and just know that the next guy is going to get on. It’s inexplicable, it’s mathematicial hocus-pocus, but it’s part of what makes baseball so awesome.

The players themselves are just as crazy. Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game. Mark Fidrych talked to the ball. Numerous MLB players, making millions of dollars, refuse to ever touch the foul lines when running on or off the field, under the impression that their luck will run out if they step on a white line.

It is insanity, all of it, but it is part of what makes the game so much fun to be a fan of. It gives these games soul. And sabermetricians hate it. To them, baseball is a game that is determined exclusively by obscure mathematical formulas. If you want to scream “He’s got a no-hitter going!” while the home pitcher is on the mound, go right ahead. After all, he’s got a higher BABIP than average this season, so he’s due to get the next few guys out. If you want to shave your playoff beard, feel free. That beard, according to their calculators, has nothing to do with tonight’s game. There is no energy. E doesn’t equal MC squared. It doesn’t exist. Baseball, you see, happens in a vacuum, and the odds of that no-hitter being broken up have nothing to with what you’re screaming at the pitcher, but with what the current batter does when there are less than two outs and runners in scoring position during a day game.

Baseball, you see, isn’t a magical sport with billie goats or Bambinos cursing teams. The Cubs haven’t won since 1908 because they’ve had a low Pythagorean expectation. That goat thing? Absurd. How can a goat affect thousands of baseball games? According to my equations, goats equal zero!

These are the same people who sit their children down at age 4 and explain that Santa can’t exist because he couldn’t possibly deliver presents to every house on Earth in a single night. They go to cocktail parties and remind everyone that, mathematically, someone in the room is going to die in a horrific accident. They are, quite simply, the kind of obnoxious, know it all clowns that no-one wants to hang out with.

Oh sure, they make some good points. RBIs and wins are overvalued. (Though I learned that the win stat was useless after watching the miserable luck of Mets pitcher Anthony Young in the early 90s, who lost 27 straight games despite having a career ERA similar to Cy Young winner Zach Greinke’s). Yes, WHIP can be a valuable tool for understanding the value of pitchers, and OPS tells us more about a hitter than RBIs. Many of the sabermetrics are really cool, and help show the game in a whole new light. My problem isn’t with the math itself. My problem  is with the tools who use it as gospel, and feel the need to prosthelytize it to at every opportunity. Yeah, we get it. It’s great. Now go back to your basement.

I read Moneyball. I thought it was awesome. Taught me to look at the game a whole new way. But it didn’t kill the magic, because more than every algebraic equation ever formulated, the magic is what makes baseball the greatest sport on earth. That is why, in 2008, I wore the same shirt for every game of the World Series. Well, except one.  Game 2, which the Phillies lost. Now, according to sabermatricians, my wardrobe choices that week had nothing to do with the ballgame. But if you had tried to steal that particular shirt from me that week we would have fought to the death.

And that’s the problem. The problem is that not only do sabermetricians not think that the shirt had anything to do with the outcome of the game, they are the types of people who have to tell you that the shirt had nothing to do with the outcome of the game. They are the types of people who like to rub it in your face if you think a shirt, or a curse, or an inside out hat has an impact on a game. You see, they’re right. They’ve got the formulas to prove it, and all you’ve got is voodoo. And just when you thought they couldn’t be more obnoxious about it, they got played by Brad Pitt in a movie.

Last night, I dared to remark on twitter that Albert Pujols was clutch (Of course, I may have egged it on a bit with “Sorry SABR Nerds, but Albert Pujols is clutch”). I might as well have stated that that the sun revolves around the earth. One guy wrote, “I love when you can pick and choose when things are and are not clutch.” Another guy wrote, in disbelief, “Wha…what?” A final guy just said, “What a moron.” I am serious about these responses, by the way. These people were outraged by the very thought of something in baseball being clutch, and they were waiting to pounce as soon as someone insinuates that it exists. I see them do this all the time on Twitter. They are some of Twitter’s biggest bullies.

Whenever someone dares bring up the word “Clutch”, they throw their 20-sided die across their mom’s basement and go apoplectic. “Blasphemy! Outrage! Heathen! How could you dare utter something so preponderous? Don’t you understand that Albert Pujols 9th inning hit was the result of 10,000 deductions regarding ballpark size, time of day, his lifetime average against right handers with red hair, etc. etc. all of which I’m going to explain to you right now?”

And so, on October 14th, 2003, they saw a different game than the rest of us did. When Luis Castillo stepped back into the box, his chances to get out were just the same as they were a pitch ago. After all, it was just a foul ball. And when he got walked, Cubs fans started to look at each other uncomfortably, aware that something awful was happening. Sabermatricians had no such inkling. After all, the Cubs still had a 3-0 lead.

Then the wheels fell off. A wild pitch, a single by Pudge Rodriguez and the score was 3-1. A gloom as dark as the night hung over the ballpark. (Though a sabermetrician would have me explain here that “Gloom” is subjective and doesn’t technically exist, and that according to their weather analysis of that night there was a waxing gibbous moon, meaning that it really wasn’t all that dark out in Chicago). Then one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball booted a routine ground ball, and the game was over. Fans at Wrigley knew it, people watching on TV knew it, anyone who knew the Cubs’ history knew it. There were black cats and goats and balls though Leon Durham’s wickets. They were not going to overcome this. Anyone with a soul could see clearly what was going to happen next. The Marlins were not only going to win this game. They were going to win the series.

But not the sabermetrics guys. After all, according to their calculations, the Cubs still had a 68% chance to win after that foul ball, wild pitch, and that error. To them, there was no momentum shift. Which only proves one thing; the sabemetricians know a lot more about math than they do about baseball.

Previously by Bobby Badtimes: Girls basketball team that lost 100-0 is a bunch of losers.

Barry Bonds is good for baseball. (written in 2006)